I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
It’s so atrocious!!! Asked my friend with SHIT taste in games whether the hype was true and he lied to me that it was a great game.
I had completed every film except episode 9 (the wound of actually watching it was still too tender). So i focused on levelling up character abilities and doing quests. When I was outside a planet, getting shot at as usual, I realised every single planet had the same copy and paste battle event, and I’d have to do this for all 30 something of the planets in the game. It made me angry that it was so full of time wasting activities. I uninstalled.
They also dismantled a formula which worked very well, to make that game. And to make lego the incredibles and lego indiana Jones 2 (arguably less so. That one is really fun); these three all have abnormally short levels. It’s lazy. Nobody would have complained if they just released the same levels from the complete saga but slightly expanded, accommodating new character abilities and mini kit puzzles, and focused on making character movement and combat more fluid (the one thing they did achieve)